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Show HN: Get a Professional Headshot in Minutes with AI

147 points by peteralaoui 4y ago

After playing with AI Avatars (like many of us I guess around here), I started to wonder if we could instead bring real value to people by producing affordable professional head-shots using a combination of Dreambooth and ControlNet. Obviously it's only the beginning and there are still many imperfections, but the foundational tech behind this (Dreambooth and ControlNet) are only respectively 6 months and 1.5 month old, and already delivers pretty amazing results. I came up with this little service "Virtual Face" and I'm looking for feedback if some of you are willing to try it (you can use the HUNTER50 coupon to get 50% off, can't make it free to try yet since the running costs are still non-negligible). Cheers, Pierre

petesergeant 4y ago
I like the idea a lot, but none of the sample images on the first page look like photos, they all look like graphics. I wonder if there's some tweaking you can do?
- peteralaoui 4y ago
  Thanks for the feedback, I do have a new pipeline in the making that aims at improving the photorealism just tested it today with a few users (if you want to try, I can run it manually you, DM me on Twitter @_dulacp) Out of curiosity, which part of the image makes you say that?
  - petesergeant 4y ago
    I think it's the soft focus, the model's skin doesn't have any texture and looks overly airbrushed and cartoonish
tennisflyi 4y ago
Good enough for small avatars, IMO. But, it's very similar to just Lensa...
unstatusthequo 4y ago
Pay button doesn’t seem to work on mobile. Also, can’t remove photo once added on mobile.
- peteralaoui 4y ago
  Would you mind to share which mobile device you are using? Asking because it seems to work well on Android and iOS devices that I have at home.
- sakerbos 4y ago
  It doesn't work on desktop too, Brave Browser. I got it to work turning shields off.
layer8 4y ago
> With just 15 photos of you That’s a hard ask if you’re a photophobic person.
- peteralaoui 4y ago
  Indeed, and I consider myself part of that group! Thanks for the feedback. I can probably lower this requirement to a minimum of 5, while mentioning to the user that the more pictures the merrier for the model
  - sdrothrock 4y ago
    I wonder if you could change this to allow a video input via prompts to turn your head in various angels, like registering for facial recognition. Then it might not trigger the distaste for photos AND you could get better data for face placement.
    - nonethewiser 4y ago
      That seems like a good idea.
    - dorkwood 4y ago
      Similar tools I’ve tried seem to want photographs taken under different lighting scenarios in different environments. Photos all taken in the same room, apparently, produce worse results.
    - peteralaoui 4y ago
      It's a cool idea to simplify the input as you said, though as @dorkwood pointed out this would lead to bad results with a lot of overfitting, this model needs a lot of variation to only register your facial features as "you", and disentangle that from the surroundings or even from your clothes. (this is due to how this model learns, maybe a future model will alleviate that)
      - barking_biscuit 4y ago
trevyn 4y ago
If you like writing your own prompts and experimenting, https://astria.ai https://astria.ai can do this kind of thing too.
- peteralaoui 4y ago
  Astria is a great service, but doesn't have ControlNet integrated to the best of my knowledge. So, if you really want to reproduce this on your own without using a service like ours, I would advise to: i) train a model with Astria, ii) download the model checkpoint from Astria, iii) install Automatic1111 UI with the ControlNet extension and now you will have a local setup that is very close to what we have, the only missing piece is that we have a custom model optimize for faces.
  - trevyn 4y ago
    What are you using ControlNet for? In my experience it’s trivial to get headshot-framed images.
    - peteralaoui 4y ago
      We use it to get consistent results, otherwise only 30% of the generated images have the right composition. For example, Astria has its own trick to increase the number of headshot in frame, if you download the checkpoint and run it locally you will see that it doesn't handle well negative prompts (which, IMHO, is usually a side effect observed on fine-tuned style models with dreambooth). With this trick you can get up to 70% of headshots in frame but won't reach 100% without risking a loss of prior knowledge. This is my experience so far, maybe you have another opinion based on your experience.
naet 4y ago
Too expensive for something with no previews or samples. Interesting idea but I wish there was more to demonstrate the results before purchasing. If I was dedicated I think there are some free solutions for training a model on your own face out there but you might have an edge in convenience. Ten dollars seems too steep for that though.
- peteralaoui 4y ago
  Thanks, interesting because I thought that the styles pictures (available after clicking on the call to action) would serve as samples but I guess I should put them on the homepage directly. I will try that tomorrow (European timezone ^^)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - smortaz 4y ago
    yes definitely home page. it’s the first thing i looked for, didn’t immediately see, hit the back button. i would also consider a trial pic for free tied to email.
  - angry_moose 4y ago
    My problem with it is you only show results for 2 people, for which a solid ~third of the "real life" ones look kinda bad (not even getting into the animated versions). It reads to me like you cherrypicked the two best examples and even those aren't great, whether that's true or not. Edit: Woof, I didn't realize you could get bigger versions of the examples. They were mostly fine as thumbnails but blown up to ~500x500 the the eyes and mouth are rough.
    - precompute 4y ago
      >They were mostly fine as thumbnails but blown up to ~500x500 the the eyes and mouth are rough. That's the result of automated training. If you want good results you need to properly label your dataset (15 or more images of yourself) and then use a proper upscaling solution for it. Dreambooth-based images usually need some manual fine-tuning (and sometimes inpainting) to look presentable at higher resolutions. You can use latent upscaling for adding details but it'd require some manual supervision to weed out the bad generations. Using upscalers like Lanczos is usually foolproof.
atleastoptimal 4y ago
It still looks like AI so people may think I'm a fake person
- peteralaoui 4y ago
  Fair point :) I feel at this stage only early adopters might try it, but with the next iteration or two I'm feeling this gap will be closed
  - raldi 4y ago
    It would also help credibility if you showed a bunch of real, untouched input/output examples — not just outputs by themselves.
carrolldunham 4y ago
The examples look like cartoons, have artefacts and are quite obviously the output of AI to anyone who has ever seen it, which at this point is a lot of people. Even someone who never saw stable diffusion generations is going to be wondering about why you have weird blobs in your eyes.
- peteralaoui 4y ago
  Could probably add GFPGan to my pipeline to remove these eyes artifacts. Thanks for the candid feedback :) I will double down on that
- tennisflyi 4y ago
  It's entirely good enough for a small-ass avatar. Also, what blob? The catch-light?
- mikepurvis 4y ago
  Refresh a few times— there are several examples and some are better than others. I expect that part of the point of giving you a selection to choose from is that not all of them will be winners; as the final human in the loop, you can pick which ones you feel truly look like you.
IgorPartola 4y ago
I wonder how much AI is going to change online dating apps. “Hey Stable Diffusion, generate a photo of me shaking hands with Tom Hanks” and I have a cool profile photo. Bots can do the same: “generate a photo of me holding my driver’s license, I need it for Tinder verification”.
- altcognito 4y ago
  I'm confused by why so many people are worried about disinformation at this level. Sure, it's going to be difficult to have authority and trust at the state level and that's a governmental issue, but at a personal level, all this means is that the face to face conversation is going to carry more weight. I don't really make much of people's social media profiles, it's all just nonsense.
- snek_case 4y ago
  On Tinder and other dating apps, I see lots of women using very obvious filters that just make them look sort of blurry and pale and I always swipe left. I just question why they would go for filters that are so obviously filters. Everyone knows that's not what you look like, and it doesn't even look good. But now TikTok has these new video filters that can add makeup and look very realistic [0]. Can make women go from ordinary looking to supermodel. Follows the person's movement flawlessly. Unfortunately, when technology like that becomes more common, people are definitely going to be tricked, and feel tricked. It's going to be awkward going on a date and the person looks nothing like what you expected... Awkward on both ends. At some point... The online reality might become so fake, with disinformation generated by bots, generated images and videos, fake dating profiles (that are actually also just bots)... I wonder if it's going to spur some kind of reactionary movement. A movement to disconnect from the internet completely, or at least so socialize more in real life. Maybe some bars and pubs where you have to check in your cellphone at the door. Offline cafes. [0] The new TikTok makeup filters in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw2euJzOk60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw2euJzOk60
  - somsak2 4y ago
    I don't really see how it's that bad. When meeting in-person, women spend the time to put on all that makeup -- it's not different, that's why it feels so "realistic." Why is it so bad that a filter can do that without all the work that is normally required?
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
I usually hate dumping on Show HNs, but given the societal impacts of this, I feel the need to be blunt. Call me old fashioned, call me a luddite, whatever, but I hate this. So now even our profile pictures aren't really us, but just some pseudo-reality version of who we think we are. And I know I know, people will argue that makeup/airbrushing/photoshop/facetune has been going on forever, but at some point I feel like we cross the line where it's no longer "reality with some touchups", but instead it's "complete fantasy made to mimic reality". I just feel like AI is shooting us head first down this state where reality and fantasy are evermore difficult to differentiate, and I don't like the implications.
- insanitybit 4y ago
  Sounds great tbh, reality fucking sucks and maybe fantasy won't be such a fundamentally broken shit show. Here's hoping.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    The idea that "reality sucks" implies a comparison to a fantasy world. If the fantasy world gets better, and reality stays the same, any relative perception that "reality sucks" will get worse. If you compare reality today to reality at any other time, reality is pretty great.
    - insanitybit 4y ago
      It does not imply that. Reality can suck irrespective of all other things.
- 000ooo000 4y ago
  Another step closer to The Great Logging Off.
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    Amen. I've been having a growing sense of an existential crisis over the past few months, and while a lot of it is due to the general fear of "will AI put me out of a job in the next 5 years", more of it has to do with fact that I'm just uneasy about where tech is headed. I spent my entire career diving head first into technology, and for the first half of it I was supremely optimistic about it. Things have obviously soured over the past decade as I've seen the negative impacts the internet has on our public discourse, mental health (including my own), etc. But now, seeing what AI has on the horizon, I'm honestly just like "I need to go for a fucking walk, upon which I will throw my phone into the river."
TheObviousOne 4y ago
[dead]
- critismAccepted 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing! But why in Hebrew :O From the showcase photos, looks promising and high quality output. Definitely going to try it in the weekend!
rcarr 4y ago
I don’t know if this is what you were already thinking with the movie costume headshots but if this doesn’t work for the business industry you could probably pivot this and aim it at the casting industry so they can get a feel for what actors would look like in costume.
- peteralaoui 4y ago
  Thanks! Great idea. I will probably experiment something. Allowing some flexibility in the types of costumes might be tricky though (today it's easy because I only allow for a few outfits for "business" looks).
sourcecodeplz 4y ago
This is definitely the most stupid landing page I've ever seen. No wonder we have designers, developers, marketers, product managers etc. Proves to show that you can have the best/most amazing product in the world BUT if you can't communicate what it does, it will always fail.
- dvngnt_ 4y ago
  what's wrong with it
- peteralaoui 4y ago
  You don't relate to the message? I'm curious to know what is the first thing you would change
  - sourcecodeplz 4y ago
    Well I am 50% sorry for that message. I was on mobile and the first thing I saw was a FAQ about the license. Nothing about what the product does, no screenshots. Today I checked it out again on desktop and the message was a lot clearer. The rest of 50% remains as per the poor mobile experience.
- op00to 4y ago
  Ok. You don’t like it. What would you change?
lxe 4y ago
Still a little uncanny tbh.
NoPicklez 4y ago
Cool idea and I think it has serious uses but these aren't professional headshots, these are borderline emoji's of ourselves. It would be great if you could adapt the output to be more realistic. I'm personally not a fan of beautifying our pictures.
- peteralaoui 4y ago
  Thanks, feedback well received! I do have a new pipeline that I'm experimenting with and it's much more realistic (hopefully realistic enough to end this emoji feeling). If you are interested in trying, we can talk in DM: twitter.com/_dulacp
  - NoPicklez 4y ago
    I do think that it's a good feature for perhaps more informal images on gaming sites, avatars etc
neilv 4y ago
Interesting application, but I'm confused on the licensing. > All images produced are released under the CreativeML Open RAIL-M license. How does this work, legally? Are the rights to the likenesses of the person in these output images being licensed by someone under the CreativeML Open RAIL-M license? If so, to whom is it licensed? And by whom?
- peteralaoui 4y ago
  Hmm to be honest I just reused the most restrictive license of the tools that compose the app. I guess I should rephrase to something like "The rights of the images are transferred to the user who purchased the service" or hire a lawyer to have it rephrased properly.
angry_moose 4y ago
For linkedin or Outlook profile type purposes that'll never be seen at higher than ~200x200 I surprisingly don't have a problem with this in theory. I've never seen a corporate headshot photo that doesn't suck anyway and it saves me putting on a suit and taking an awkward photo. $10 for a "well, maybe the computer will generate something good enough that you like, sorry no refunds" is a big turnoff though.
- peteralaoui 4y ago
  Seeing examples from happy users might help? Or a refund policy could seal the deal? :)
ICodeSometimes 4y ago
Seems like someone else had the same idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35242174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35242174 Ironically both of you launched on the same day.
mhitza 4y ago
Hey Pierre, there's no information about who's behind the website (not a single name), and your terms page has not yet filled in the placeholders > Questions about these Terms should be sent to the Company at [insert company email or contact information].
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Varqu 4y ago
How is this different / better than the other submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35242174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35242174
code51 4y ago
> Are my uploaded photos private? > Yes. All your images are yours and we are deleting them 7 days after your processing. We are keeping them 7 days in case you lose the link to download them (contact us in that case). It's not about whether you delete the files after processing. What is your infra? Where do you store the files? How do you transmit the files there? Do you use proper encryption? How secure are your servers? How secure are your (if) cloud-related keys? See OpenAI prompts leaking. Good example of what can go wrong. What guarantees my photos (or even visual model) won't get leaked into another user's account?
- kypro 4y ago
  It's a valid point, but do you know of any companies which meet this standard? Perhaps if they were dealing with highly sensitive information then it makes sense to make those kinds of disclosures, but for novelty headshot generator app? I'm not sure it makes sense to require that level of detail or expect it. But to your point, I hate uploading anything private or personal anywhere for this exact reason. Even if you trust the company has good intentions, you also have to trust every employee at the company with privileged access, that their cyber security is adequate, and that all of their infrastructure providers can all be trusted. And given that you basically have to assume your information could be misused regardless of the company's intent.
  - barking_biscuit 4y ago
    >Perhaps if they were dealing with highly sensitive information then it makes sense to make those kinds of disclosures, but for novelty headshot generator app? Such a model can be used to generate nudes of you.
    - op00to 4y ago
      Good god people would go blind if they did that to me.
- HeavyFeather 4y ago
  It’s photos of your face. Billions of people upload billions of selfies every day. No one cares. If you don’t want your face to be seen, wear a mask and don’t leave the house.
lemoneyeo 4y ago
Love the product
precompute 4y ago
This is hardly an "advanced algorithm", anyone can do this on a free colab instance. You need a few images of yourself for training on, and you can make a LORA for Stable Diffusion, and use it for anything you wish. The pricing is only for the ease of usage. People have made LORAs for anime characters, celebs, etc and they work pretty well. See Civitai, it has a large collection of models / LORAs / text embeddings. These days you don't even need to suss out the negative prompts, you can use a negative text embedding (bad-hands, easynegative) to get good quality images. Dreambooth is practically ancient now. You don't need to lug around huge converged models trained on a few images and a few tags. You can download a much smaller LORA and include it in your prompt and it just werks.
- pc86 4y ago
  Peak HN comment right here. Most programmers have never made a LORA and have never used Stable Diffusion. For 99.9% of people outside the programmer class, this is absolutely an "advanced algorithm." Just because you understand what it's doing under the hood, and just because it can be abstracted into a handful of discrete steps, doesn't mean it isn't advanced.
  - precompute 4y ago
    >Peak HN comment right here. Where do you think we are? >this is absolutely an "advanced algorithm." When someone puts that on his product's page, it's assumed that he developed said algorithm, or at least had a hand in it. Instead, here the real product is the pipeline and not the "algorithm". The product would do better if it was honest about what it did. And like I mentioned, Dreambooth is pretty "old" now. The service could probably be much cheaper if the OP moved to using LORAs, and it would give better results, because it wouldn't clash with the tokens in the underlying model, and could be used with any model. Guide to LORA: https://imgur.com/a/mrTteIt https://imgur.com/a/mrTteIt https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/11vw5k3/lora_training_guide_version_3_i_go_more_indepth/ https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/11vw5k3/lo...
    - barking_biscuit 4y ago
pgib 4y ago
What is the resolution? (Surely this should be part of the FAQ.)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
erwan577 4y ago
Nice service idea. If you operate in the EU, the site definitely requires more legalese as this deals with real personal data : cookies popup, GDPR contact, site editor, company juridiction, the whole shebang.
jamesdhutton 4y ago
I like the idea. I am surprised by the negative comments. Getting a professional headshot is both time-consuming and expensive, so if this service works as promised it definitely will be useful, and I would be willing to pay for it. So why haven't I already signed up? A few things made me nervous: 1. The "contact us" link is broken, which doesn't inspire confidence. 2. It's important to me that you don't leak or retain my data, and while I know you say you don't retain it, I will just have to take that on faith and I'm not sure I'm willing to do that. 3. Your examples include novelty shots like "pharaoh" and "superman" etc. This branding is confusing. If you're targeting people who want professional shots for their LinkedIn etc then why would you offer jokey picture styles? If you can solve these issues then you can count me in as a customer.
aroundtown 4y ago
I need to see more examples, as it stands the example photos look soulless. It's the eyes, they don't seem to be focused on a particular target like the camera. And a few seem like each eye isn't looking at the same spot.
gardenhedge 4y ago
Web app won't let me actually pay. The pay button does nothing edit: ah, ublock was blocking it
oigursh 4y ago
https://cdn.virtualface.app/media/styles/030beee6-e882-4c3d-8f10-d039dbeda093.jpg https://cdn.virtualface.app/media/styles/030beee6-e882-4c3d-... 0_o
tirpen 4y ago
"Identity fraud as a service". What a disruptive and novel idea that will clearly make the world a better place.
clnq 4y ago
I liked the app but wouldn't use it for professional profile pictures since it generally gets facial features (particularly eyes) wrong. However, it helped me discover interesting dress styles that work with my face, which could be another potential use for this technology. I think exploring 250 or so clothing styles in a few minutes would be very interesting. I'd appreciate it if the app allowed users to input height/weight for accuracy, didn't generate very high contrast images for some styles (like the hacker), and let users add training data to their profile over time. Finally, producing 20 images of each style in one go might not be very cost-effective on your side. I think the Dall-E and Midjourney approach where they generate one image and let you generate more variations could make this more economical for you.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  > However, it helped me discover interesting dress styles that work with my face, which could be another potential use for this technology There are many caveats with that usage (not everyone built same) but I would agree this is an interesting idea and definetly should be explored.
- akarsh-gopal 4y ago
  This might not fully address what you describe here, but I built https://www.try-it-on.com https://www.try-it-on.com to do something similar, would love for you to check it out!
MasterScrat 4y ago
One of the core component of such products is Dreambooth, which allows you to finetune text to image models (typically Stable Diffusion) to be able to create images of a specific person, object or style. We are building a platform to speed up this process while reducing the cost (currently 3x the speed, 0.5x the cost of competition): https://dreamlook.ai/ https://dreamlook.ai/
Imnimo 4y ago
If I see an obviously AI generated face (and these are pretty obvious), I'm going to assume the person is non-existent and whatever communication they've had with me is a scam.
ano-ther 4y ago
Looks promising. Obviously bad news for photographers. What does the license imply? > Can I use my virtual faces for commercial use? > Yes. All images produced are released under the CreativeML Open RAIL-M license. Does it mean someone else can use the picture freely (which wouldn’t be the case for traditional pictures)? I understand that you delete them after 7 days. But what about people who find that picture online?
poulsbohemian 4y ago
In my area, real estate agents regularly will use headshots from at least a decade ago, in a sad attempt to look younger. I find that at least as distasteful as this - if you are in a public facing capacity, just be yourself. The whole point is an accurate depiction of your visage so people can identify you in a business context; it's not America's Next Top Model. I have to do new photos at least every 18 month for different marketing campaigns - the cost is not outlandish.
barking_biscuit 4y ago
And now they can generate nudes of you.
nfw2 4y ago
FYI, checkout doesn't seem to work (with no error message, except in console) if the user has an ad blocker (at least uBlock) installed.
thiscatis 4y ago
This week in Hussle AI...
_andrei_ 4y ago
Here I am worrying about launching stuff without getting all the legal things sorted, not screwing up somehow, afraid of doing some financial illegality, or get into any trouble with the system, and others don't even put their company info on their product's website, and just "Questions about these Terms should be sent to the Company at [insert company email or contact information].", and "By uploading pictures, users grant the Platform a non-exclusive, royalty-free right to use them".
mdenardo 4y ago
Secta.ai is doing this with StableDiffusion.

147 points by peteralaoui 4y ago

petesergeant 4y ago

I like the idea a lot, but none of the sample images on the first page look like photos, they all look like graphics. I wonder if there's some tweaking you can do?

peteralaoui 4y ago
Thanks for the feedback, I do have a new pipeline in the making that aims at improving the photorealism just tested it today with a few users (if you want to try, I can run it manually you, DM me on Twitter @_dulacp) Out of curiosity, which part of the image makes you say that?
- petesergeant 4y ago
  I think it's the soft focus, the model's skin doesn't have any texture and looks overly airbrushed and cartoonish

tennisflyi 4y ago

Good enough for small avatars, IMO. But, it's very similar to just Lensa...

unstatusthequo 4y ago

Pay button doesn’t seem to work on mobile. Also, can’t remove photo once added on mobile.

peteralaoui 4y ago
Would you mind to share which mobile device you are using? Asking because it seems to work well on Android and iOS devices that I have at home.
sakerbos 4y ago
It doesn't work on desktop too, Brave Browser. I got it to work turning shields off.

layer8 4y ago

> With just 15 photos of you That’s a hard ask if you’re a photophobic person.

peteralaoui 4y ago
Indeed, and I consider myself part of that group! Thanks for the feedback. I can probably lower this requirement to a minimum of 5, while mentioning to the user that the more pictures the merrier for the model
- sdrothrock 4y ago
  I wonder if you could change this to allow a video input via prompts to turn your head in various angels, like registering for facial recognition. Then it might not trigger the distaste for photos AND you could get better data for face placement.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    That seems like a good idea.
  - dorkwood 4y ago
    Similar tools I’ve tried seem to want photographs taken under different lighting scenarios in different environments. Photos all taken in the same room, apparently, produce worse results.
  - peteralaoui 4y ago
    It's a cool idea to simplify the input as you said, though as @dorkwood pointed out this would lead to bad results with a lot of overfitting, this model needs a lot of variation to only register your facial features as "you", and disentangle that from the surroundings or even from your clothes. (this is due to how this model learns, maybe a future model will alleviate that)
    - barking_biscuit 4y ago

trevyn 4y ago

If you like writing your own prompts and experimenting, https://astria.ai https://astria.ai can do this kind of thing too.

peteralaoui 4y ago
Astria is a great service, but doesn't have ControlNet integrated to the best of my knowledge. So, if you really want to reproduce this on your own without using a service like ours, I would advise to: i) train a model with Astria, ii) download the model checkpoint from Astria, iii) install Automatic1111 UI with the ControlNet extension and now you will have a local setup that is very close to what we have, the only missing piece is that we have a custom model optimize for faces.
- trevyn 4y ago
  What are you using ControlNet for? In my experience it’s trivial to get headshot-framed images.
  - peteralaoui 4y ago
    We use it to get consistent results, otherwise only 30% of the generated images have the right composition. For example, Astria has its own trick to increase the number of headshot in frame, if you download the checkpoint and run it locally you will see that it doesn't handle well negative prompts (which, IMHO, is usually a side effect observed on fine-tuned style models with dreambooth). With this trick you can get up to 70% of headshots in frame but won't reach 100% without risking a loss of prior knowledge. This is my experience so far, maybe you have another opinion based on your experience.

naet 4y ago

Too expensive for something with no previews or samples. Interesting idea but I wish there was more to demonstrate the results before purchasing. If I was dedicated I think there are some free solutions for training a model on your own face out there but you might have an edge in convenience. Ten dollars seems too steep for that though.

peteralaoui 4y ago
Thanks, interesting because I thought that the styles pictures (available after clicking on the call to action) would serve as samples but I guess I should put them on the homepage directly. I will try that tomorrow (European timezone ^^)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- smortaz 4y ago
  yes definitely home page. it’s the first thing i looked for, didn’t immediately see, hit the back button. i would also consider a trial pic for free tied to email.
- angry_moose 4y ago
  My problem with it is you only show results for 2 people, for which a solid ~third of the "real life" ones look kinda bad (not even getting into the animated versions). It reads to me like you cherrypicked the two best examples and even those aren't great, whether that's true or not. Edit: Woof, I didn't realize you could get bigger versions of the examples. They were mostly fine as thumbnails but blown up to ~500x500 the the eyes and mouth are rough.
  - precompute 4y ago
    >They were mostly fine as thumbnails but blown up to ~500x500 the the eyes and mouth are rough. That's the result of automated training. If you want good results you need to properly label your dataset (15 or more images of yourself) and then use a proper upscaling solution for it. Dreambooth-based images usually need some manual fine-tuning (and sometimes inpainting) to look presentable at higher resolutions. You can use latent upscaling for adding details but it'd require some manual supervision to weed out the bad generations. Using upscalers like Lanczos is usually foolproof.

atleastoptimal 4y ago

It still looks like AI so people may think I'm a fake person

peteralaoui 4y ago
Fair point :) I feel at this stage only early adopters might try it, but with the next iteration or two I'm feeling this gap will be closed
- raldi 4y ago
  It would also help credibility if you showed a bunch of real, untouched input/output examples — not just outputs by themselves.

carrolldunham 4y ago

The examples look like cartoons, have artefacts and are quite obviously the output of AI to anyone who has ever seen it, which at this point is a lot of people. Even someone who never saw stable diffusion generations is going to be wondering about why you have weird blobs in your eyes.

peteralaoui 4y ago
Could probably add GFPGan to my pipeline to remove these eyes artifacts. Thanks for the candid feedback :) I will double down on that
tennisflyi 4y ago
It's entirely good enough for a small-ass avatar. Also, what blob? The catch-light?
mikepurvis 4y ago
Refresh a few times— there are several examples and some are better than others. I expect that part of the point of giving you a selection to choose from is that not all of them will be winners; as the final human in the loop, you can pick which ones you feel truly look like you.

IgorPartola 4y ago

I wonder how much AI is going to change online dating apps. “Hey Stable Diffusion, generate a photo of me shaking hands with Tom Hanks” and I have a cool profile photo. Bots can do the same: “generate a photo of me holding my driver’s license, I need it for Tinder verification”.

altcognito 4y ago
I'm confused by why so many people are worried about disinformation at this level. Sure, it's going to be difficult to have authority and trust at the state level and that's a governmental issue, but at a personal level, all this means is that the face to face conversation is going to carry more weight. I don't really make much of people's social media profiles, it's all just nonsense.
snek_case 4y ago
On Tinder and other dating apps, I see lots of women using very obvious filters that just make them look sort of blurry and pale and I always swipe left. I just question why they would go for filters that are so obviously filters. Everyone knows that's not what you look like, and it doesn't even look good. But now TikTok has these new video filters that can add makeup and look very realistic [0]. Can make women go from ordinary looking to supermodel. Follows the person's movement flawlessly. Unfortunately, when technology like that becomes more common, people are definitely going to be tricked, and feel tricked. It's going to be awkward going on a date and the person looks nothing like what you expected... Awkward on both ends. At some point... The online reality might become so fake, with disinformation generated by bots, generated images and videos, fake dating profiles (that are actually also just bots)... I wonder if it's going to spur some kind of reactionary movement. A movement to disconnect from the internet completely, or at least so socialize more in real life. Maybe some bars and pubs where you have to check in your cellphone at the door. Offline cafes. [0] The new TikTok makeup filters in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw2euJzOk60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw2euJzOk60
- somsak2 4y ago
  I don't really see how it's that bad. When meeting in-person, women spend the time to put on all that makeup -- it's not different, that's why it feels so "realistic." Why is it so bad that a filter can do that without all the work that is normally required?

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

I usually hate dumping on Show HNs, but given the societal impacts of this, I feel the need to be blunt. Call me old fashioned, call me a luddite, whatever, but I hate this. So now even our profile pictures aren't really us, but just some pseudo-reality version of who we think we are. And I know I know, people will argue that makeup/airbrushing/photoshop/facetune has been going on forever, but at some point I feel like we cross the line where it's no longer "reality with some touchups", but instead it's "complete fantasy made to mimic reality". I just feel like AI is shooting us head first down this state where reality and fantasy are evermore difficult to differentiate, and I don't like the implications.

insanitybit 4y ago
Sounds great tbh, reality fucking sucks and maybe fantasy won't be such a fundamentally broken shit show. Here's hoping.
- kube-system 4y ago
  The idea that "reality sucks" implies a comparison to a fantasy world. If the fantasy world gets better, and reality stays the same, any relative perception that "reality sucks" will get worse. If you compare reality today to reality at any other time, reality is pretty great.
  - insanitybit 4y ago
    It does not imply that. Reality can suck irrespective of all other things.
000ooo000 4y ago
Another step closer to The Great Logging Off.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  Amen. I've been having a growing sense of an existential crisis over the past few months, and while a lot of it is due to the general fear of "will AI put me out of a job in the next 5 years", more of it has to do with fact that I'm just uneasy about where tech is headed. I spent my entire career diving head first into technology, and for the first half of it I was supremely optimistic about it. Things have obviously soured over the past decade as I've seen the negative impacts the internet has on our public discourse, mental health (including my own), etc. But now, seeing what AI has on the horizon, I'm honestly just like "I need to go for a fucking walk, upon which I will throw my phone into the river."

TheObviousOne 4y ago

[dead]

critismAccepted 4y ago
Thanks for sharing! But why in Hebrew :O From the showcase photos, looks promising and high quality output. Definitely going to try it in the weekend!

rcarr 4y ago

I don’t know if this is what you were already thinking with the movie costume headshots but if this doesn’t work for the business industry you could probably pivot this and aim it at the casting industry so they can get a feel for what actors would look like in costume.

peteralaoui 4y ago
Thanks! Great idea. I will probably experiment something. Allowing some flexibility in the types of costumes might be tricky though (today it's easy because I only allow for a few outfits for "business" looks).

sourcecodeplz 4y ago

This is definitely the most stupid landing page I've ever seen. No wonder we have designers, developers, marketers, product managers etc. Proves to show that you can have the best/most amazing product in the world BUT if you can't communicate what it does, it will always fail.

dvngnt_ 4y ago
what's wrong with it
peteralaoui 4y ago
You don't relate to the message? I'm curious to know what is the first thing you would change
- sourcecodeplz 4y ago
  Well I am 50% sorry for that message. I was on mobile and the first thing I saw was a FAQ about the license. Nothing about what the product does, no screenshots. Today I checked it out again on desktop and the message was a lot clearer. The rest of 50% remains as per the poor mobile experience.
op00to 4y ago
Ok. You don’t like it. What would you change?

lxe 4y ago

Still a little uncanny tbh.

NoPicklez 4y ago

Cool idea and I think it has serious uses but these aren't professional headshots, these are borderline emoji's of ourselves. It would be great if you could adapt the output to be more realistic. I'm personally not a fan of beautifying our pictures.

peteralaoui 4y ago
Thanks, feedback well received! I do have a new pipeline that I'm experimenting with and it's much more realistic (hopefully realistic enough to end this emoji feeling). If you are interested in trying, we can talk in DM: twitter.com/_dulacp
- NoPicklez 4y ago
  I do think that it's a good feature for perhaps more informal images on gaming sites, avatars etc

neilv 4y ago

Interesting application, but I'm confused on the licensing. > All images produced are released under the CreativeML Open RAIL-M license. How does this work, legally? Are the rights to the likenesses of the person in these output images being licensed by someone under the CreativeML Open RAIL-M license? If so, to whom is it licensed? And by whom?

peteralaoui 4y ago
Hmm to be honest I just reused the most restrictive license of the tools that compose the app. I guess I should rephrase to something like "The rights of the images are transferred to the user who purchased the service" or hire a lawyer to have it rephrased properly.

angry_moose 4y ago

For linkedin or Outlook profile type purposes that'll never be seen at higher than ~200x200 I surprisingly don't have a problem with this in theory. I've never seen a corporate headshot photo that doesn't suck anyway and it saves me putting on a suit and taking an awkward photo. $10 for a "well, maybe the computer will generate something good enough that you like, sorry no refunds" is a big turnoff though.

peteralaoui 4y ago
Seeing examples from happy users might help? Or a refund policy could seal the deal? :)

ICodeSometimes 4y ago

Seems like someone else had the same idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35242174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35242174 Ironically both of you launched on the same day.

mhitza 4y ago

Hey Pierre, there's no information about who's behind the website (not a single name), and your terms page has not yet filled in the placeholders > Questions about these Terms should be sent to the Company at [insert company email or contact information].

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Varqu 4y ago

How is this different / better than the other submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35242174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35242174

code51 4y ago

> Are my uploaded photos private? > Yes. All your images are yours and we are deleting them 7 days after your processing. We are keeping them 7 days in case you lose the link to download them (contact us in that case). It's not about whether you delete the files after processing. What is your infra? Where do you store the files? How do you transmit the files there? Do you use proper encryption? How secure are your servers? How secure are your (if) cloud-related keys? See OpenAI prompts leaking. Good example of what can go wrong. What guarantees my photos (or even visual model) won't get leaked into another user's account?

kypro 4y ago
It's a valid point, but do you know of any companies which meet this standard? Perhaps if they were dealing with highly sensitive information then it makes sense to make those kinds of disclosures, but for novelty headshot generator app? I'm not sure it makes sense to require that level of detail or expect it. But to your point, I hate uploading anything private or personal anywhere for this exact reason. Even if you trust the company has good intentions, you also have to trust every employee at the company with privileged access, that their cyber security is adequate, and that all of their infrastructure providers can all be trusted. And given that you basically have to assume your information could be misused regardless of the company's intent.
- barking_biscuit 4y ago
  >Perhaps if they were dealing with highly sensitive information then it makes sense to make those kinds of disclosures, but for novelty headshot generator app? Such a model can be used to generate nudes of you.
  - op00to 4y ago
    Good god people would go blind if they did that to me.
HeavyFeather 4y ago
It’s photos of your face. Billions of people upload billions of selfies every day. No one cares. If you don’t want your face to be seen, wear a mask and don’t leave the house.

lemoneyeo 4y ago

Love the product

precompute 4y ago

This is hardly an "advanced algorithm", anyone can do this on a free colab instance. You need a few images of yourself for training on, and you can make a LORA for Stable Diffusion, and use it for anything you wish. The pricing is only for the ease of usage. People have made LORAs for anime characters, celebs, etc and they work pretty well. See Civitai, it has a large collection of models / LORAs / text embeddings. These days you don't even need to suss out the negative prompts, you can use a negative text embedding (bad-hands, easynegative) to get good quality images. Dreambooth is practically ancient now. You don't need to lug around huge converged models trained on a few images and a few tags. You can download a much smaller LORA and include it in your prompt and it just werks.

pc86 4y ago
Peak HN comment right here. Most programmers have never made a LORA and have never used Stable Diffusion. For 99.9% of people outside the programmer class, this is absolutely an "advanced algorithm." Just because you understand what it's doing under the hood, and just because it can be abstracted into a handful of discrete steps, doesn't mean it isn't advanced.
- precompute 4y ago
  >Peak HN comment right here. Where do you think we are? >this is absolutely an "advanced algorithm." When someone puts that on his product's page, it's assumed that he developed said algorithm, or at least had a hand in it. Instead, here the real product is the pipeline and not the "algorithm". The product would do better if it was honest about what it did. And like I mentioned, Dreambooth is pretty "old" now. The service could probably be much cheaper if the OP moved to using LORAs, and it would give better results, because it wouldn't clash with the tokens in the underlying model, and could be used with any model. Guide to LORA: https://imgur.com/a/mrTteIt https://imgur.com/a/mrTteIt https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/11vw5k3/lora_training_guide_version_3_i_go_more_indepth/ https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/11vw5k3/lo...
  - barking_biscuit 4y ago

pgib 4y ago

What is the resolution? (Surely this should be part of the FAQ.)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

erwan577 4y ago

Nice service idea. If you operate in the EU, the site definitely requires more legalese as this deals with real personal data : cookies popup, GDPR contact, site editor, company juridiction, the whole shebang.

jamesdhutton 4y ago

I like the idea. I am surprised by the negative comments. Getting a professional headshot is both time-consuming and expensive, so if this service works as promised it definitely will be useful, and I would be willing to pay for it. So why haven't I already signed up? A few things made me nervous: 1. The "contact us" link is broken, which doesn't inspire confidence. 2. It's important to me that you don't leak or retain my data, and while I know you say you don't retain it, I will just have to take that on faith and I'm not sure I'm willing to do that. 3. Your examples include novelty shots like "pharaoh" and "superman" etc. This branding is confusing. If you're targeting people who want professional shots for their LinkedIn etc then why would you offer jokey picture styles? If you can solve these issues then you can count me in as a customer.

aroundtown 4y ago

I need to see more examples, as it stands the example photos look soulless. It's the eyes, they don't seem to be focused on a particular target like the camera. And a few seem like each eye isn't looking at the same spot.

gardenhedge 4y ago

Web app won't let me actually pay. The pay button does nothing edit: ah, ublock was blocking it

oigursh 4y ago

https://cdn.virtualface.app/media/styles/030beee6-e882-4c3d-8f10-d039dbeda093.jpg https://cdn.virtualface.app/media/styles/030beee6-e882-4c3d-... 0_o

tirpen 4y ago

"Identity fraud as a service". What a disruptive and novel idea that will clearly make the world a better place.

clnq 4y ago

I liked the app but wouldn't use it for professional profile pictures since it generally gets facial features (particularly eyes) wrong. However, it helped me discover interesting dress styles that work with my face, which could be another potential use for this technology. I think exploring 250 or so clothing styles in a few minutes would be very interesting. I'd appreciate it if the app allowed users to input height/weight for accuracy, didn't generate very high contrast images for some styles (like the hacker), and let users add training data to their profile over time. Finally, producing 20 images of each style in one go might not be very cost-effective on your side. I think the Dall-E and Midjourney approach where they generate one image and let you generate more variations could make this more economical for you.

justsomehnguy 4y ago
> However, it helped me discover interesting dress styles that work with my face, which could be another potential use for this technology There are many caveats with that usage (not everyone built same) but I would agree this is an interesting idea and definetly should be explored.
akarsh-gopal 4y ago
This might not fully address what you describe here, but I built https://www.try-it-on.com https://www.try-it-on.com to do something similar, would love for you to check it out!

MasterScrat 4y ago

One of the core component of such products is Dreambooth, which allows you to finetune text to image models (typically Stable Diffusion) to be able to create images of a specific person, object or style. We are building a platform to speed up this process while reducing the cost (currently 3x the speed, 0.5x the cost of competition): https://dreamlook.ai/ https://dreamlook.ai/

Imnimo 4y ago

If I see an obviously AI generated face (and these are pretty obvious), I'm going to assume the person is non-existent and whatever communication they've had with me is a scam.

ano-ther 4y ago

Looks promising. Obviously bad news for photographers. What does the license imply? > Can I use my virtual faces for commercial use? > Yes. All images produced are released under the CreativeML Open RAIL-M license. Does it mean someone else can use the picture freely (which wouldn’t be the case for traditional pictures)? I understand that you delete them after 7 days. But what about people who find that picture online?

poulsbohemian 4y ago

In my area, real estate agents regularly will use headshots from at least a decade ago, in a sad attempt to look younger. I find that at least as distasteful as this - if you are in a public facing capacity, just be yourself. The whole point is an accurate depiction of your visage so people can identify you in a business context; it's not America's Next Top Model. I have to do new photos at least every 18 month for different marketing campaigns - the cost is not outlandish.

barking_biscuit 4y ago

And now they can generate nudes of you.

nfw2 4y ago

FYI, checkout doesn't seem to work (with no error message, except in console) if the user has an ad blocker (at least uBlock) installed.

thiscatis 4y ago

This week in Hussle AI...

_andrei_ 4y ago

Here I am worrying about launching stuff without getting all the legal things sorted, not screwing up somehow, afraid of doing some financial illegality, or get into any trouble with the system, and others don't even put their company info on their product's website, and just "Questions about these Terms should be sent to the Company at [insert company email or contact information].", and "By uploading pictures, users grant the Platform a non-exclusive, royalty-free right to use them".

mdenardo 4y ago

Secta.ai is doing this with StableDiffusion.